Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) goes home one evening to find his wife dying and a one-armed man running from the premises. The doctor is wrongly convicted of her murder on circumstantial evidence. While transporting prisoners to prison, there is a scuffle on the bus. The bus crashes onto train tracks and derails a train. Amidst the chaos, Dr. Kimble escapes. Now a fugitive, he's pursued by US Marshall Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones). Gerard gets close to capturing him several times, but eventually he gets away. Gerard rounds up other escaped prisoners, while Kimble goes looking for the one-armed man. He returns to Chicago where a medical friend, Charles Nichols (Jeroen Krabbe), helps him. Kimble gets an apartment and a hospital job so that he can look through the prothesis records for the one-armed man. He suspects the man was working for a medical company interested in doing big business with Kimble's hospital. He finds the one-armed man on a subway, disables him, and heads to a convention the hospital is having with the medical firm. He realizes he was targeted because he was doing tests that would have put a kabosh on big plans the company had in the works. He realizes his friend, Dr. Nichols, is part of the scheme, and he challenges him in front of the whole convention.